Cataclysm Dungeons: Healing Abyssal Maw: Throne of the Tides

Welcome to the first of my guides on healing strategies for the Cataclysm dungeons, yes I KNOW its six months in and us veterans can do it sleep walk but many alts and new players will be coming through about now. My viewpoint will be from that of a priest, but much of the information will be generic to help out other healing classes also. Even if you’re not a healer you can get some benefit from reading as you’ll understand how you can help out your healer at key times during the encounters.

The Throne of the Tides is a short dungeon with 4 bosses, it is located in Abyssal Depths and is part of the Abyssal Maw complex. Our enemies here are naga, murlocs, faceless ones and servants of the Old Gods.Trash packs
The trash is pretty harmless even on heroic mode. However, on heroic mode if you and/or your tank are only just geared for the instance there are a couple of static packs of mobs where CC could be useful. There are a couple of nasty sentinel mobs that spit green acid on the floor, move out of it and you’re fine. If the tank stands in it it will make your job harder so yell at him. If DPS stand in the goo yell at them and if they don’t move stop healing them and res after the fight is won.

Make sure that someone interrupts Shock Blast – it hurts and will need to be healed through if the tank/DPS fail;

Run out of blue circles;

At 66% and 33%, summons adds and shields herself. 2 are casters – they should die first and only require provisional tanking. The 3rd is a melee add with a low-health enrage. Adds can be CC’d and their chain lightning hurts if it goes on too long.

Heroic: Dodge water spouts in the add phase. The further away from her you are, the easier this gets.

He casts Dark Fissure don’t get hit by it and yell at the tank if he does, laugh at any DPS that get caught by it when you scrape them up after the fight is over. It spawns a powerful void zone on the ground as well.

He grabs party members, carrying them around for a while, then dropping them. Make sure they get healed and fast if they get dropped in void zones.

He slows the tank making Dark Fissure dodging more difficult, if you’re Holy and have speed bubble use it often.

The trash on the way to Erunak can be brutal, as a priest the inability to remove poisons here makes it harder, heal the tank and group heal as best you can. If you’re out of mana make sure your group know so you can drink up.

Erunak Stonespeaker and Mindbender Ghur’sha
He needs to be faceed away from the group as he has a breath-like attack.
Avoid earth shards (a ground-traveling damage spell).
remind any interupters to interupt the Lava Bolt, it hurts
At 50%, the squid will leave Erunak – tank’n’spank the squid until it mind controls a party member.
When a party member gets MC’d, DPS them down to 50% to knock the squid off again. Resume tank’n’spank.
Green clouds will silence/pacify you. Don’t stand in them.Heroic: Nothing special.

Trash packs

The trash on the way to Ozumat is a killer if handled badly. However if done right it is easy. The tank should aggro everything and the DPS focus on the large Tainted Sentries, you and the DPS should stand in front of the tank, the smaller adds are a pain and do very little damage but they apply a nasty disease that you MUST remove. Healing through it is pointless your mana is best spent dispelling. If you’re a class that cannot dispel it, this is Blizzard’s payback from the easy ride you had on the way to Erunak. If you are out of mana, ask your group to hide behind the scenery to the left of the tunnell just before pulling the last 2 Tainted Sentries.

The big add will fly up and crash to the ground several seconds later run away from the crash and heal those that failed.

Phase 2, DPS should kill the faceless one adds. The tank should kite the demons, healing him is a priority as is yelling at anyone stood in the black goo.

Phase 3 is a race against time – all players, should switch to the boss at the edge of the room. Use cooldowns to keep people alive and use your group heals and most mana inefficient heals as your mana here is endless.

Death Knights can solo the last phase, even on heroic by spamming Death Strike and AMS to drop debuff stack.

Heroic: Nothing special, just a little bit harder.

All that is left now is to loot and move on to the next dungeon, but thats for another day. If you have any comments, corrections or amendments to this guide please leave a comment below.